Habits the phone taught you · habit 12 of 40

Letting the keyboard finish it

Typing on a sheet of glass should not work as well as it does. It works because the keyboard is guessing constantly, correcting quietly, and remembering what you type so it can guess better next time.

The habit

You stopped proofreading years ago because the keyboard is right almost every time.

Why it is automatic

Nobody trained this keyboard on purpose. It trained itself, from you, in the background, and typing got easier month by month without any effort. That is a pleasant experience and it produces total trust. People type at speed on a phone precisely because they are not checking.

The correction is designed to be invisible. It happens as you type rather than afterwards, there is no confirmation, and the corrected version is what you see. If you are watching the next word rather than the last one, the change goes past unread.

Replacement keyboards spread because the built in ones were slower or lacked a layout somebody needed. Installing one is normal, the permission screen appears once, and after that it is simply the keyboard.

What it actually does here

The learned dictionary is the first mechanism. Type a string often enough and it becomes a candidate the keyboard is willing to suggest. It then appears in the suggestion strip in unrelated apps, above a message to somebody else, sometimes with a screen visible to a person sitting beside you. You did not put it there and you cannot predict when it will surface.

The second mechanism is the keyboard itself. A replacement keyboard sits between your fingers and every app on the phone, and some of them are network services that process text elsewhere in order to do what they promise. The permission the phone asks for before enabling one is worded plainly, and it is asked once, long before it matters.

The third mechanism is the one that costs the most. A long random address is not a word in any language, which makes it exactly the kind of string autocorrect exists to replace. A single character changed silently produces a completely different address, and nothing on the phone will flag that anything happened. There is no spelling of a mars onion link that a keyboard can check against, so the check has to be yours.

The last thing to know is that the dictionary travels. On most setups the learned words follow the account to the next device, which means a string typed on one machine can be suggested on another one you were treating as separate. The wider version of that problem is on the section hub.

How a keyboard decides what you meant

A phone keyboard does two jobs at once. It guesses which key you intended from where your thumb landed, and it guesses which word you are partway through. Both guesses use a dictionary, a model of ordinary text and a record of what you personally type.

Unusual strings are therefore the hardest case for it, and the case where it is most likely to be confidently wrong. A short odd word gets underlined. A long unpronounceable one gets treated as a mistake worth fixing, because that is what it usually is.

The string that is not a word

Type a long address by hand into a field with autocorrect running and you may end up with something that looks nearly identical and is not the same address. The difference might be one letter in the middle. Reading it back at a glance will not catch it, because reading a random string at a glance is not a thing people can do.

That is the argument for not typing addresses at all, on a phone or anywhere else, and for checking in character groups rather than skimming if you have typed one already.

What to do instead

Everything here is about taking the guessing out of the loop for the thirty seconds where guessing is expensive.

1. Turn off autocorrect and predictive text before typing anything that has to be exact, and turn them back on afterwards.
2. Prefer the system keyboard over a replacement one for anything exact, and check which keyboards are installed while you are in there.
3. If the keyboard has learned something you would rather it forgot, use the reset dictionary option, which clears the learned words without touching anything else.
4. Where a string has to move between fields, move it whole rather than retyping it, after reading the clipboard that remembers.
5. Compare what you typed against the source in groups of a few characters rather than reading it as a shape.

How to notice you did it anyway

The keyboard will show you what it has learned if you ask it in a harmless place, which is the whole of this check.

• Open a notes field and type the first few characters of anything you have typed often. Watch the suggestion strip rather than the field.
• Open the keyboard settings and read the list of installed keyboards, including ones you enabled once and forgot.
• Check which of those keyboards were granted full access, and whether you still use them.
• On another device signed into the same account, try the same first few characters and see whether the suggestion follows you.
• Reread anything exact that you typed rather than pasted, slowly, against the original.

What readers ask about this habit